Life lessons from a guy who's just trying to make his life count

Hacker’s approach to productivity and career development – Universal Truths

On 15th of November 2018 I gave a talk at TestWarez conference, where I wanted to share my experience and observations, to help others gain a bit richer perspective on life, which would help them solve non-trivial career related challenges.
Unfortunately I’ve ran out of time before I could close my story properly, which is why I’ve decided to create this blog post and ensure that people who attended my talk actually received what they were looking for. If you want to jump right into the subjects I haven’t managed to go through, scroll down to about 2/3 of this article.
If you haven’t attended the talk, just go ahead and read the parts that you feel could bring you some value

1. Who am I and why do I want to talk about things such as happiness in the workplace and career management?

I’m no guru and I don’t claim to be one. I’m just a man who’ve spent a significant part of his life chasing great career and while I’m doing my thing, I want to share the biggest so far takeaways of my life’s study. I’m not going to tell you that you can become a CEO of billion dollar organisation, or that you can earn $X if you do Y, or that you can become the greatest person on the planet. I don’t know that, and I don’t have such answers. But I do have answers which can help you get better at whatever you’ve decided to be doing. There are patterns that many people have noticed and shared in one form of another, and I want to do the same with my community. Create a list of things that are proven to not work, and things that are proven to have a potential of increasing the odds of your success. When you have that, you can try it out and see what happens. Assuming obviously that you want to try something new, because you feel stuck.

If you’re happy, if you’re content and you’re living life on your terms then I don’t think I have anything for you, really. By all means continue doing things that you know are good for you. However, if you’re a person that have tried many things and still don’t see any significant change into the positive, then you might want to take a look here and there.

Many things I’m going to talk about here, are things you’ve most likely have heard about already and it may seem like nothing new is here. Which is about right, and that used to be my attitude as well. That’s the reason why I share such long back stories and create a context for what’s coming up next. I’m sharing my knowledge in a way which I know worked for me and which made me who I am today. First I had to attain a better understanding of things such as human nature and rules of the corporate world, to be capable of comprehending the cliché things that we often hear about. I had to understand why things are the way they are, I had to understand why we act the way we act and only after knowing that there are many moving elements which dictate our state of being, I could get myself to work on changing my position in life.
You really can’t solve a problem if you don’t know what the problem is, and more often than not what we believe to be a problem, in fact turns out to be just a facade for something much more complex. And explaining that complexity takes time, it takes years, but I want to try to compress is as much as possible to make it quickly digestible for everyone else. I do believe there are ways we can share our knowledge and help others understand the subject faster – for some it’s a kind of a shock therapy, because they come expecting a list of things they can take and implement right away to take their life’s on the next level. Then you drop a massive amount of knowledge, observations, and advice, and you let them think about it. You spark an inner thought process which makes people think “what if?”. “What if there is actually something about it, and there are ways to get what I wanted despite my past failures?”. That thought is what ignites the start of a bigger change. Sharing just a set of tips you’ve heard many times will often get forgotten without any action. Sharing a way of looking at the world which makes you question a thing or two, is the game.

In my career, I’ve had a privilege of working as a computer programmer, cybersecurity specialist, manager, team leader and business advisor. But it’s not about me and you probably shouldn’t care. Judge content based on its merits, not its author.
It’s that I’ve tasted many things which gave me an opportunity to interface with many fantastic people at various stages of their career at various organisations. For some reason I wanted to know what it is that differentiates people who’re under-performing, those who are achieving a lot and those who’re basically mediocre. What it is that differentiates people who thrive in the workplace, who love their job, who love themselves when they’re doing the specific type of work; from people who struggle to achieve their goals. I’ve had a privilege of not only collaborating with multiple companies of various sizes as an employee, but also were given a chance to recruit people into teams I was working in. I’ve recruited people into the IT sector for a roles with a paycheck as little as $400 per month and as much as $15k per month. I’ve seen people who were paid twice as much as the other person holding the same position at the same organisation and the question was – how come?
Although it’s not all about the money, it’s a lot about the money. Money is a reasonable indicator how well someone is performing at work, and it’s just something that’s more tangible than skills, knowledge or experience. It’s hard to compare people based on their skills or knowledge, but it’s really simple to compare two numbers. It’s especially easy, when you work with diverse organisations with people who get to the absolute TOP of corporate structure within 5 years and people who barely manage to get any movement across the career ladder over those 5 years.
Obviously there are people who simply choose to take it easy and who don’t care much, there are people who have different genetic predispositions and all that, but you know what I’m saying. I’m pretty sure you’ve met in your life two people who tried really hard, who wanted to achieve the same, yet they achieved completely different results.

So I started paying more attention, because I was really curious. Fast forward to over a decade later, I believe I came to conclusions and some universal truths which can be applied by many of us, obviously each and everyone of us getting different results. But there certainly are things that simply work.
Let me end this intro with the following statement, which should put some more clarity into what I’ve been trying to say:
I don’t believe you or me can become world-class NBA players just because we’ve watched how LeBron James got there. That would be delusional and as far from the truth as one can get. But I definitely believe that we can learn from LeBron to become better at playing basketball than we currently are. No one can promise you or me, that we’ll become world-class at it. But if you put in the right type of work in the right amounts, there are high chances you’ll get better at it and that’s what most of us want and need.

2. Why do I care enough to share it, instead of just doing my thing and investing the time to better myself?

Well, if you get to a point in which you’ve tested something on yourself, you made yourself happier and can see something is working, you just don’t want to keep that to yourself if you see people around you struggling with the exact same thing. It’s such a waste.

People are truly struggling and way too many people waste their potential because they don’t know any other way. I don’t really want to get into what people are doing, because it’s their lives and it’s up to them how they want to live it, but the thing is that many of people who’re struggling just don’t want to, or don’t know how to ask for help. They’re not unhappy because they want to. They are unhappy because they don’t know what else they can do, so they try many things, they fight, they put in the work, and they try to do something good. And sure, many people find their way, become happy as one can get and live a fulfilled and joyful life.
But why would we want others to waste their precious time on trying things that are known to simply not work? Or why would we want people to take a longer path if there is a faster way to get where they want to get, which would save them not only time but some pain, which is inevitable when you try new things.

To me it’s just a right thing to do. If someone doesn’t want to listen to the advice, they won’t and that’s absolutely cool. But if there happens to be a person who wants to try something new, then you’re at least giving that person an opportunity to learn about other ways than the ones they currently know about. Then it’s up to them to try it or not, but at least they get a chance to trying something else.

The problem with unhappy people is that the misery loves company and we’re very empathetic creatures. We’re humans and we’re bound to each other whether we like it or not. We affect each other and we influence each other. And understanding this concept allowed me to get through things I couldn’t wrap my head around before.
Success is cool and all that, but the internal success i.e. happiness is what most of us are really chasing. Also, if you’re happy, you can make others happy. If you’re unhappy and feel stuck, there are high changes that not only you’re not making others people happy but you’re actively making them unhappy.

So yeah, chasing happiness is something that really matters. Because by being stuck and being unhappy you’re not doing anyone any favor. Your state influences state of other people. And although we want good for people whom we hang out with and we don’t want to make them unhappy, we’re way too often lost in our thoughts, to realize that we’re unconsciously intoxicating lives of those around us.

I believe most people do their best and try to be the best they can. But sometimes it’s not a lack of enthusiasm or lack of ideas that’s stopping us from achieving our goals. It’s lack of consciousness and self-awareness that doesn’t allow us to connect the dots.

3. So, do you want to save yourself and others some struggle and at the same time achieve more? Go ahead, there is a few things that are really important for you to get yourself on the right track.

First of all, I believe that we’re way too confused, especially in the early days of our careers. We don’t know what we’re supposed to be doing, so we try to follow people who we think like they have it all figured out. We read an online magazine and we read about top performers, those people everyone looks up to and secretly wants to be. And we try to replicate what they’re doing, which includes doing things such as heavy meditations, more rigid diets, following a heavily disciplined schedule, waking up at 4AM like the CEO from a cover of the Forbes magazine and other crazy things.

It’s absolutely a good idea to experiment and try those things, but for most of us – those tips simply won’t cut it. Each and everyone of us is different, and we need tweaks and adjustments to all the recommendations we hear from other people. We fail to recognize that magazines write about things people want to read, which not necessarily being at the same time things which will actually work for people reading it.

As an example of a process to dissect, let’s pick the sleep schedule, which is something many people try, after getting motivated from reading an article about some TOP performer. When we read about someone like Tim Cook who gets up at 4:30AM, we see the end result. What we fail to recognize is that Tim’s wake up time is a result of the process that he established for himself during his lifetime which also requires other changes to his schedules. Magazines want to tell you that you can be more successful and you’ll get more things done if you wake up at 4:30AM, because hope sells well. But they forget to mention that to wake up at 4:30AM and be productive by any measure, you need to go to bed at 8PM day earlier.

When you read about someone having a rigid diet, you don’t see the process it took someone to prepare their body for such a change. You see the result, but you’re not given enough insights into the process of getting there which is a key for improvement and which is something we must all do thoroughly.

It’s not enough to implement into our lives the elements that successful people do. More often than not, it’ll fail for very simple reasons such as the fact, that your body and your brain are complicated systems, which don’t adapt overnight. It takes a long long time for your brain and body to get used to different times you wake up. It takes a lot of time for your body to adjust the management of nutrients you’re feeding it with.

Combine waking up at 4:30AM with drastic change of messy diet into keto diet and the next thing you know is you’re an anxious zombie who instead of being more productive is an ass to anyone who just happens to be around.

You got to take it easy, and you got to find what’s right for you. And what’s right for you is what you’ve been testing for quite some time, not something a journalist put into the magazine.

I like to say that 99% of things TOP 1% performers do, aren’t practical for 99% of other people. By the same token, I do believe that if someone who in the past was in the position you’re now and achieved some sort of success, then you can follow their steps and get somewhere close to where they’re at. Most likely not to the same place, because there are too many differences between each one of us, but you can certainly change your position to some extent, as some thing are universal and in general work in many situations.

So if you want to be as great as some specific person you admire and to do the things they’re doing, then it’s a much better strategy to follow their footstep and try to replicate their success. Because if you look at it rationally, what makes you think that you can simply switch to doing some things overnight, if it took your idol months or years to get there? Successful people decide to do those things you read about, not because they’ve decided to do them after reading an article, but because they know it’s right for them and they’ve been getting there their whole lives.

You got to get some respect to the journey, because by following it, you can make yourself more compatible with the end results that you’ve seen that other person to have.

4. From what I’ve seen in my life, among my peers and all over the world, there are about four major areas which contribute to people’s lack of happiness in relation to their career.

People are stuck at the job, in which they feel they’re not being rewarded well enough

People feel like they’re somewhat stuck with their skills and career in general

People are stressed and they lack work-life balance

People are hopeless, because they’ve expected something else than they’ve received and they just can’t see anything beyond that

None of these things are trivial and there is no answer which will work for everyone, but there certainly are patterns which show why some people experience one or more states from the list above, and why some people don’t even know what these things mean – because they’ve never experienced it.

So if you’re experiencing any of those things, then it may be worthwhile to look at some of the things that can be done, to change that state of being. There are certainly a few mistakes related to a workplace, that people do which makes their career to develop way slower than in potentially could.

4.1. Sticking too long with one company

Some people feel like they’re getting nowhere, and they’re not getting paid enough and they’re not progressing as well as people in the industry, because they happened to be in the wrong organisation. It’s not that they’re not good enough or that they don’t deserve better compensation, it’s just that they’ve been working in one place for too long. In the current state of IT industry, there are zero reasons to stay with one company if the job is making you unhappy. There are so many companies, good, great, average, and bad ones, that you can’t possibly try them all during your lifetime. If you’re working in IT, you won’t run out of companies who’re looking for competent employees.

Sometimes it really can’t be said that given organisation is bad, just because you feel unhappy while working there. Some organisations are just made for some type of people, and for some people it may be the best company of their lives. Just because you have different expectations, doesn’t mean the company is bad. If you work for a company that’s producing a type of service which doesn’t generate that much revenue, then it’s not it’s fault. It’s their business model to do things they’re doing and it’s absolutely fair that they have a low compensation they can offer you compared to some other organisation. If you’re feeling like you’re expectations aren’t being met although you’ve talked to right people about it, then switch the company instead of being miserable and blaming company you work for, for not being another Facebook or Amazon. You got to understand that if you want to get paid as much as software engineers working for Facebook, you should try to get into Facebook instead of complaining that your company can’t offer you the amounts of money other people get at Facebook.
This may sound trivial but it’s really not that simple of a choice. We often have unreasonable expectations because we focus too much on our expectations instead of setting high standards for ourselves. If you want to expect something from your company, you must analyse how much does it cost you first.

Get out of your comfort zone and find the right place for yourself instead of making yourself miserable because of lack of courage to change your workplace.
There are always trade-offs and there are always risks as it is with anything in life. Those risks aren’t go away and you probably won’t be less afraid of them anytime soon, but you can become more courageous and more willing to face them and to go after it regardless.

[On remote work

I believe remote work should be available to everyone, but it doesn’t mean anyone can do it. Working remotely can be great, but it can also get really ugly. You need to know what’s right for you and what you’re capable of doing. You need to study yourself to understand in what configuration you’re performing at your best. Just because there are many articles written by people who dropped their corporate job and went travelling all over the world and working remotely, doesn’t mean it’s a right choice for you. It’s tempting, it looks good on paper, but for some people it’s just a wrong thing to do. Just because there are many people saying that you can get much more work done while working in the home office – which can be true – doesn’t mean you’ll be able to achieve that. For most people, there are other ways to be productive and to achieve what they want to achieve, without trying to save as much time as possible by going remote. ]

4.2. Disrupting your career development by leaving an organisation too early

We’re humans and we are irrational. We can often get as far in our irrationality that we want to leave an organisation because we don’t like the commute or we don’t like the meeting that we’re required to attend or because we don’t like to hangout with some person that works in the same office. And instead of trying to resolve the issue, we get emotional, we forget how tiny actually is that thing which irritates us and we go way too far. If you don’t like your workplace, you need to analyse what it is that you actually don’t like. In my experience it rarely happens that the whole organisation is broken and everything is ugly. It’s just a one or few things that we tend not to like and sometimes can’t accept. But we need to have such dialogue with ourselves and understand what it really is that makes us unhappy at the workplace. Chances are that you actually enjoy doing what you’re doing, you have fun being around most people most of the time, you’re getting compensated well enough, but you really don’t like that one person which is bothering you or the long commute it takes to get to the office. But the feeling is so intense and negative when it happens, that you let your emotions take control and then you think like the entire world is against you and you must seek escape. And sometimes, the answer to a toxic coworker can as simple as switching a floor you work at or negotiating with the company an option for you to work remotely.

People who go ahead in life, nailed this skill down. They’ve understood that what they think is happening, may not really be the case. Human beings are complicated and we’re not trained in any school that I know of, how to detach and analyse our problems by looking at things for what they truly are as opposed to what our emotions are making us to see.

So detach and dissect each complicated situation to find the root cause for the bad situation you’ve found yourself in.

5. 10Xers aren’t superhumans. They just know how to get things done.

Many people experience a lot of stress, because they don’t feel like they’re learning enough. They experience stress because they miss deadlines and sometimes blame the company for putting too much workload on their shoulders. The thing is that if you want to develop your career, you just need to deal with the workload. And for many people, the reason they are stressed out, and they can’t manage their workload, isn’t because their company is expecting too much from their employees. It’s because people can’t put enough order to the chaos, they waste a ton of time and they have too little time and/or energy to get necessary things done. They get stressed out, and after a while they get anxious, because their life is falling apart. They can’t manage the workload, so they go home and work even more. They’re stressed even more, because they have no time to decompress. This puts them in the downwards spiral leading to anxiety and feeling hopeless.
I’m not saying it’s always the person’s fault, but way more often than we think, it really is. If you could only focus on doing the work you could easily get things done in the office, and then don’t touch anything work related when you get back home.

So if anything I’ve written in this paragraph feels familiar to what you’ve been experiencing lately, then I highly recommend you to take a closer look at how you really spend your time.

If you want to be productive, you should consider these things which really do matter:

5.1. You may not know how to get in the zone, how to put yourself in a flow state and do the deep work.

In a field such as IT, where we heavily rely on our creative brain we really need to focus. We can’t really multitask well, so if you want to do something well, you must focus on that thing alone. We’re living in a world of constant disruptions caused by our inability to control the distractions, which makes us unconsciously do things such as checking our phone each few minutes, browsing social medias each time you feel stuck at work and alike. If you’re stuck with something, you don’t know how to solve a problem at work, you don’t know how to use a programming library, then you’re not going to learn that by reading a motivational article or by checking what’s up on Snapchat. If you want to solve a problem, you must focus on solving a problem and getting deep into your work. If you need to learn an API, you must read about an API, understand how it works, try it out, and get back to major task of implementing that API. If each time you face an obstacle, you shift your focus on something else than removing that obstacle, you’re wasting your time. You’re not going to find a way in a background to solve a problem you’re facing for the first time, while browsing reddit. All your brain power must go into the task and getting it done. People who perform well just focus, and focus on getting work done.

Many people go to work for 8-10 hours, and if they actually counted, they’d realize they’ve worked maybe for 3-4 hours and the rest was spent on either doing something else or on “getting back to work”. So yeah, there are definitely people who in one year can achieve what for some other people take 3 years to achieve. It’s a simple math, if someone goes to work and work for 6 hours straight and know how to get into the zone, they can actually get 18 hours worth of work of someone who’s constantly falling for distractions, switching tasks and never getting into the zone.

5.2. Those people who outperform you, often don’t work more than 8 hours a day. Because for most of human beings it’s technically impossible to get our brain to produce meaningful work for any longer than that. They just use their time wisely, they don’t allow their primitive brain to take control and get quick dopamine shots. They have a discipline over their mind and they push regardless of the tricks their brain is trying to play. And they know how important it is to rest each day, so they get back home and they try to actively relax. They don’t lie to themselves that they can squeeze some more work in a day. They realize, that after a couple hours of deep work, they won’t be able to do anything worth the struggle. Because if you’ve been really working for those 8 hours, then your brain is exhausted. And you can put in 5 more hours, but for most of us, it’ll be worth maybe 1 hour of work. So instead of wasting those 5 hours, get some rest, enjoy your life and recharge for the battle of a next day.

You’ll need that. You need that balance, and you need to understand the signals that come from your brain and your body and which are telling you when you can still push a bit, and when it’s time to back off. And I promise you this is not easy by any means. And it’s impossible to learn to recognize such signals from your body, if you never go into a quiet place and you’re overwhelmed by a noise of distractions of the world we live in. You need that time off, that quiet time for yourself, to reflect. To think about your feelings, to think about your plans, to let yourself feel things. And if you don’t have the discipline, you don’t focus on getting the work done when you’re in the office, you won’t get that quiet time for self-reflection. You’ll be to stressed out and too busy.
That’s how complex we are. One thing that’s off and dysfunctional can put our whole life into jeopardy. That’s why I never create blog posts such as “10 things to make you XYZ”, because it’s worthless. There are way too many things you need to take care of first, before any of those 10 things have even a slight chance of bringing any value into your life.

5.3 People who go ahead in life, know how to be productive. And most people don’t really know what being productive entails. Replying to hundreds of emails a day and talking with coworkers on Slack doesn’t make you productive. It makes you feel productive, but what it actually does is making you busy. And being busy is far from being productive, because these two things have nothing in common. Your goal isn’t to be busy. You want your time, you want your life, you don’t want to be busy. What you want it to be productive, to get work done. The work that needs to be done and work that contributes to the bigger picture. Unless you’re working in a Customer Support role or something similar, replying to emails isn’t getting work done. Certainly not for most people who visit my blog, because most of you happen to be software engineers for whom getting work done means producing code, producing a product, creating an art that can be sold to a customer who pays for the service. That’s contributing to the bigger picture.

To be productive you must recognize the difference between being efficient and effective. People obsess with being efficient, and they’re being told that working hard will earn them what they want to earn in life. Which is silly, because what’s actually going to bring you closer to your goal, is indeed working hard, but working hard on things that are important. You can be efficient at zeroing your mailbox, but is it effective for you and your organisation? It’s not. Communicating with people is necessary, but you should get that done as quickly as possible and get back to actual work.

Effectiveness is doing the right things. Efficiency is just doing things right. And you need both. You need to work hard but before you get yourself into the grind you must know how to work smart, it is to know what are the things your manager and your team wants you to focus on.

I don’t know a single person who got promoted for being the fastest person in the company in answering emails of their coworkers. But you bet I know people who got really far in live because they delivered important work on time. Human being way too often fail to recognize that doing lots of work, doesn’t mean they’re doing the work that matters. And the person that signs checks for you, couldn’t care less how much you’ve worked if the outcome of said work hasn’t directly or indirectly produced a revenue for your company.

So that’s one of the biggest takeaways and lessons I’ve learnt in my career. The results are the only thing that matters to the business. Everything else is just a noise, so learn how to get things done.

6. Attitude matters

I’m really not into the motivational coaching or things like that. I stay away from it, so don’t get me wrong, but there is something that is really real, and that is your mindset. If you have fixed mindset and you don’t believe you can achieve something big, you most likely won’t. It’s not about any law of attraction, or believing that if you constantly imagine you’re going to become a millionaire, you’re one day just going to become one. No one is coming to rescue you, and no one is going to knock on your door and hand you a check for $1M out of the blue.

You got to work for it, which is the crucial point. But to work for it, you must believe that there is something in it for you. Because how could you achieve something big, if you don’t believe it in so you don’t do anything about it? You need to have an internal motivation and you need to allow yourself to believe that you can achieve the thing you want to achieve. Then put in the work, and see if you were right. Time flies by anyways. You know what’s going to happen if you do nothing. But you have no idea what may happen if you take action.

6.1 That’s why it’s so important to surround yourself with right people.
You’re the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with, is one of the most real lessons being shared out there. If you surround yourself with negative people, who complain about their life and do nothing to change their state, it’s easy to fall into the same category. It’s easy, because if you have people who accept your weaker self, it’s hard to push yourself to get better, because why would you sweat if everyone accepts you anyways? And those dreams won’t go away, they will just go into hiding and after 5 years it won’t be fun to look back and see that you haven’t really done much, and that time is gone and you’re not getting it back. It’s painful to realize that you could be enjoying the fruits of your work and living your dream, if you haven’t had allowed other people to dictate your will.

If you surround yourself with negative people, who point fingers at others, it’ll be hard to take ownership over your situation, because it’ll be easy to also blame everyone but you for your misery. And if you get yourself in such environment it’s going to be really, really hard to escape, because those people won’t feel secure enough to let you chase your dreams and achieve your goals. If you take ownership and you show that it’s possible to achieve something if you put in the work, you’ll make them feel bad with themselves. Because now they’ll have a living example that if you put in the work and stop expecting someone else to give you everything, you can do better in life. And that’s scary, because now it exposes them and leave them no excuse to stay where they are.

So be careful about your surroundings, because you really need great people in your life, who want good for you, or for both of you instead of thinking only about themselves. You need people who can support your mission, and whose mission you can support. You want to have a tribe where you all aim at doing better and wish each other the best instead of sitting together complaining how bad you’ve got it and how many reasons are there to not pursue your dreams. You’ve got to have hope, and you must guard it at all cost, so people don’t take it away from you, because human’s hopelessness is a tragedy.

It’ll be good for everyone if you own your decisions and you don’t let others put you down. Because if everything is on you, and you know that you’ve made a decision yourself, you can’t point fingers at anyone else. Which can be the case, and often is the case when you do something someone told you to do and it fails. You get bitter and angry at that person, because you know they made you do it – even though it was your final call to listen to them.
So don’t let let that happen. Take it all on yourself, and give yourself no chance to blame other people for your failures.

7. Communication – a skill no.1

7.1. Your impact is limited by your inability to have meaningful conversations

I’ll keep it short here and will expand it a little bit later in the leadership chapter. But you know already that you can’t go far if you’re not productive, and you can’t be productive if you don’t know what are the critical things for the business. To know what’s critical for the business, you need to know how to listen to people and how to communicate well. So if you can’t communicate or don’t want to communicate, you can’t really be a 10Xer, let alone being a leader or someone at the top or organisation’s hierarchy.

7.2. You’re paid what you negotiate, not what you’re worth. Know your value and present it well

You get what you agreed upon and way too many people are underpaid for a simple reason, being lack of courage and actual social skills to negotiate better terms of employment. Although it’s ugly, the reality is that in 99.99% of companies you won’t face a situation in which a CFO approaches you and says “hey mate, you’ve been underpaid for the past 5 years. We’re going to compensate you for that, and we’ll triple your salary which is the current market value of someone like you!”. You got to take it into your hands, you need to learn how to communicate your expectations and understand the expectations of the other side. If you don’t do it, the most realistic scenario is that no one is going to do it for you. You’ve got to have your own back, ’cause people mind their own business, which is fair, but just don’t be naive.

I believe these are one of the most important general things everyone should know about, and now we can move into the actual recommendations for people who want to know what they can do right-away in their current situation.

8. If you have between 0-18 months of experience, I really recommend you to focus on the following things that I see many newbies failing at:

Absorb the mindset, because that’s something very difficult to attain on your own

Learn about the industry, so you know what life has to offer

Get to know people, so you can learn how to communicate well and simply create a network of people whom you like

Stay humble, because at the beginnings there are high chances you know nothing, and although you can definitely bring some great, fresh perspective, it’s much better for you if you focus on listening and absorbing that knowledge. You’ll get a chance to say it all one day, so take it easy

Don’t stress about looking too far into the future. Just do what you’re told to do, try to do it well, and ensure you’re meeting expectations of your team and employer

Learn to rest and build work-life harmony, because if you don’t create a healthy foundations early on, it’ll get increasingly harder to create good habits when life gets busier and as we get older, sacrifices get more expensive

9. So you want to be a Senior now? Cool, we need more senior people courageous enough to take more responsibilities, so let me share with you some of my truths that can come helpful.

Generally, there are two ways to have a senior role in our industry. One if more about feeling senior, and it’s when you join some bullshit company where the only prerequisite to become senior is that you’ve been with the company for 3 years and you know all the legacy mess well enough to keep it all together.

The other one, which will likely last longer and allow you to remain senior between companies is to do the work others won’t, so you can get a role they can not have. To become a senior professional at a reasonable organisation, you need to put in the work that goes way beyond your current job description. Here’re some universal truths which just work:

Put an order to the chaos, because people perform better at calm environment without too much stress. Here’s where real 1000Xers are made – they help others become 10Xers

Communicate exceptionally well, because to put an order to the chaos you need to know how to listen when people share their concerns

Be a master of your craft, because being good at something means you can do things faster, better and inspire/help others

Connect the dots and remove the obstacles, because showing an initiative earns you respect and trust of your team

Lead by example, and let the example be work ethic, willingness to go an extra mile and having an honest intent to help others

10. Those are just some things, but based on my experience and observations, these are the things that simply need to be done.
And although at this point you may reaffirm me and yourself that you’ve known it all for a long time, that’s not the point. No one, especially the nature and your company don’t care if you’ve known something. All that matters is if you’ve put it into work and made use of the knowledge you have.
It’s easy to attain knowledge. It’s a courage to do the work which differentiates people. So little, and at the same time so much.

I’ll probably update this one day or the other, because there is much more to it, but all the things that I’ve shared should really cover most cases for people who’re new in the industry.

Good luck to you all, and please remember that it’s the path not the point on a map that gets you to the destination. You had to invest quite some time to get to the conference venue, you didn’t just get out the house and made one huge jump from your home to the destination. You didn’t fight it, you didn’t complain that you can’t just teleport, so why would you expect to get results without putting in the work first? 🙂 It’s all about doing what needs to be done.

Nothing remarkable was ever achieved without putting in the work. That’s how things work and sooner you accept it, sooner you can start getting closer to achieving whatever you set for yourself to achieve.

Good luck. And maybe even more than luck – a discipline, because we all need more of it.